Mexican journalists' sons killed; seven bodies found near Mexico City

By Gabriel Stargardter

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Gunmen executed two sons of two prominent Mexican journalists in the northern city of Chihuahua, a spokesman for the state attorney general's office said on Sunday, and police found seven bodies dumped in a Mexico City suburb.

Alfredo Paramo, 20, and Diego Paramo, 21, were shot dead in Chihuahua early on Saturday after being chased through the streets by gunmen in a car, said spokesman Carlos Gonzalez.

They are the sons of well-known Mexican financial journalist David Paramo, who hosts a radio show, appears on TV Azteca and has a national newspaper column, and Martha Gonzalez, the editor of the local El Peso newspaper.

"We still don't know what they were doing there," Carlos Gonzalez said. "But this has nothing to do with the professional activities of their parents."

Mexican journalists are often targeted and killed by drug cartels for reporting on their activities. The Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based advocacy group, says 25 journalists have been murdered in Mexico since 1992.

In a separate incident, authorities found seven bodies dumped in a car in a Mexico City suburb on Sunday morning, a local police official said.

Two of the men were found naked. Police have identified three of the men, who ranged in ages from 14 to 42, the official said.

It appeared all seven men, who were found in the suburb of Ecatepec, had been shot, the official said.

Last year, police discovered eight corpses dumped in the down-at-the-heels suburb of 2 million people.

Ecatepec lies in the State of Mexico, which borders the capital to the north and where more than half the population of greater Mexico City lives.

Until 2011, Enrique Pena Nieto, now the president of Mexico, was the governor of the State of Mexico.

He has vowed to take a different tack than his presidential predecessor, Felipe Calderon, who sent in the troops to tackle the warring drug cartels. Pena Nieto has focused instead on stopping kidnapping and extortion.

Roughly 70,000 people have died in drug-related killings since 2006, when Calderon launched his military-led campaign. More than 4,200 have died in the first four months of Pena Nieto's term, a slower pace than early 2012.

(Reporting by Gabriel Stargardter; Editing by Eric Beech)

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Venezuela accuses opposition of plotting coup, seven dead

By Brian Ellsworth and Andrew Cawthorne

CARACAS (Reuters) - Violent clashes over Venezuela's disputed presidential election have killed four people, the state news agency said on Tuesday, as both sides in the stand-off planned rival demonstrations.

The deaths occurred when hundreds of protesters took to the streets in various parts of the capital, Caracas, and in other cities on Monday, blocking streets, burning tires and clashing with security forces, in some cases.

The AVN news agency said two people were killed in Miranda state, which includes part of Caracas, one in Tachira state on the border with Colombia, and another in western Zulia state. It gave no further details.

In one of the confrontations, police fired tear gas and rubber bullets in a running battle with masked, rock-wielding opposition supporters in a wealthy district of Caracas.

Opposition leader Henrique Capriles is demanding a recount of the votes from Sunday's election after official results showed a narrow victory for ruling party candidate Nicolas Maduro, the acting president.

Capriles said his team's figures show that he won the election and he has called his supporters into the streets for peaceful demonstrations.

The National Electoral Council refused to hold a full recount, saying a 54 percent audit of the widely respected electronic vote system had already been carried out.

The election was triggered by the death of socialist leader Hugo Chavez last month after a two-year battle with cancer. He named Maduro as his successor before he died and his protege won the election with 50.8 percent of the vote against Capriles' 49.0 percent.

Both sides have urged their supporters to hold peaceful demonstrations nationwide on Tuesday, raising fears of more unrest in the oil-exporting nation of 29 million people, which has seen plenty of political turbulence in the last few decades.

"Imagine if I went crazy and called the people and armed forces onto the street? What would happen in this country? How many millions would pour onto the street?" Maduro said late on Monday, blaming Capriles for the violence.

"We're not going to do it. This country needs peace. Where are the opposition politicians who believe in democracy?"

The unrest in Caracas included demonstrations outside the offices of state television channel VTV and the home of the head of the election authority.

Capriles, the governor of Miranda state, hopes to highlight the weakness of Maduro's mandate and stir up opposition anger over his charge that the electoral council is biased in favor of the ruling Socialist Party.

The strategy could backfire if demonstrations turn into prolonged disturbances, such as those the opposition led between 2002 and 2004, which sometimes blocked roads for days with trash and burning tires and annoyed many Venezuelans.

A return to prolonged trouble in the streets could renew questions about the opposition's democratic credentials on the heels of their best showing in a presidential election, and just as Capriles has consolidated himself as its leader.

LEGAL MOVE AGAINST CAPRILES?

Senior government figures have raised the possibility of legal action against Capriles.

"Fascist Capriles, I will personally ensure you pay for the damage you are doing to our fatherland and people," National Assembly head Diosdado Cabello said on Twitter, requesting that state prosecutors open a criminal investigation.

But the opposition leader says he will fight on.

"We are not going to ignore the will of the people. We believe we won ... we want this problem resolved peacefully," Capriles told a news conference.

"There is no majority here, there are two halves." Opposition sources say their count showed Capriles won by more than 300,000 votes.

His team says it has evidence of some 3,200 election day irregularities, from voters using fake IDs to intimidation of volunteers at polling centers. It wants an exhaustive check of the paper-ballots printed at the time of casting a vote.

The focus of Monday's protests in the capital was the Plaza Altamira, which was often site of opposition demonstrations during Chavez's polarizing 14-year rule. Burned-out debris and glass lay strews on the ground on Tuesday morning.

"We will protest for as long as it takes. We will not give up the streets," said Carlos Cusumano, a 20-year-old student who took part in the protest.

Wearing T-shirts wrapped around their faces, some demonstrators threw sticks and stones at the ranks of police, who wore body armor and carried shields.

Maduro, who had initially said he was open to a recount, called on his supporters to demonstrate all week. The official results showed him winning by 265,000 votes.

"Maduro won and the people have proclaimed him," said dental technician Alicia Rodriguez, 38. "Learn to lose!" she added in reference to the opposition's stance.

The head of the electoral authority, Tibisay Lucena, shot down the opposition leader's call for a recount, saying "threats and intimidation" were not the way to appeal its decisions.

She also accused the U.S. government and Organization of American States of trying to meddle in Venezuelan affairs after they backed the idea of a vote audit.

The controversy over Venezuela's first presidential election without Chavez on the ballot in two decades raised doubts about the future of "Chavismo" - the late president's self-proclaimed socialist movement - without its towering and mercurial founder.

Chavez named Maduro as his heir in an emotional last public speech to the nation before his death, giving the former foreign minister and vice president a huge boost ahead of the vote.

But Maduro's double-digit lead in opinion polls evaporated in the final days as Capriles led an energetic campaign that mocked Maduro as a non-entity and focused voters on daily problems ranging from crime to inflation and creaking utilities.

Maduro's margin of victory raises the possibility he could face future challenges from rivals in the leftist coalition that united around Chavez, who won four presidential elections.

At his last election in October, the former soldier beat Capriles by 11 percentage points even though his battle with cancer had severely restricted his ability to campaign.

(Additional reporting by Diego Ore and Girish Gupta; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne and David Storey)

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Seven killed by Islamist car bomb in north Mali: MNLA

BAMAKO (Reuters) - Seven people were killed in a suicide car bomb attack by suspected Islamist militants in the remote northern Malian town of Kidal on Tuesday, the MNLA Tuareg rebel group said, in the second such attack there in less than a week.

A spokesman for the Malian army, Modibo Nama Traore, confirmed that a car bomb had exploded in the town but was unable to provide further details.

French forces have been stationed in Kidal since driving out al Qaeda-linked fighters in late January as part of a military campaign to oust Islamist militants who seized the northern two-thirds of the West African country last year.

Kidal lies in the foothills of the Adrar des Ifoghas mountains where diehard al Qaeda-linked fighters are battling French and Chadian forces, which are being aided by the MNLA Tuaregs.

The Tuareg group had initially allied with the Islamists to seize control of northern Mali in April, taking advantage of a military coup in the capital Bamako. However, it was quickly pushed aside by the Islamist militants and now opposes them.

The MNLA said in a statement that the suicide bomber had stopped at one of the MNLA's checkpoints on a road heading southeast from Kidal and had detonated the bomb when its fighters approached his 4x4 vehicle.

"The provisional total of this attack against an MNLA checkpoint is seven dead MNLA fighters as well as several injured," the Tuareg rebel group said in a statement.

A Malian intelligence source said three vehicles had been destroyed in the blast.

The attack came after car bombs killed two people in Kidal on Thursday and five more in the Mali-Algeria border town of In Khalil on Friday.

Both were claimed by the MUJWA, a splinter group from al Qaeda's North African wing AQIM.

SIX WEEKS INTO OFFENSIVE

France is six weeks into an offensive to clear Islamist fighters from Mali's north, which Paris said was in danger of becoming a springboard for attacks on the region and the West.

It has wrested control of all of northern Mali's towns from the Islamists but now faces a worsening guerilla-style insurgency marked by suicide attacks and hit-and-run raids on towns.

In the wake of France's lightening northward drive, the MNLA says it has retaken control of Kidal and towns around the Adrar des Ifoghas mountains, where Islamists are believed to be hiding near the Algerian border.

Paris has said it aims to start withdrawing some of its 4,000 troops from Mali next month, depending on the success of its operations to mop up the remaining Islamist fighters in Mali's desert-and-mountain north.

France's intervention, however, has raised the risk for its citizens throughout the region as militant groups have vowed to exact revenge on French interests.

Gunmen claiming to be from Nigerian Islamist group Boko Haram posted a video on the Internet on Monday showing seven French hostages they seized last week in Cameroon.

The gunmen said France had declared war on Islam with its campaign in Mali and threatened to kill their captives unless fellow Islamists jailed by Cameroon and Nigeria were released.

(Additional reporting by John Irish in Dakar and Laurent Prieur in Nouakchott; Editing by Michael Roddy)

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